Terror has always been a secret language shared between generations. For many, youth is the exact moment when one learns to be afraid: when a film leaves a mark that lingers beyond the screen and settles, silently, in the dark hallways of memory. Sergio Oksman seems to begin from that conviction in A Horror Movie (2025), where he offers an intimate reflection on how we pass on our fears, our stories, and ultimately, our identity to those who come after us.
The film is born from a journey: a father and son spend a few summer days in an abandoned hotel in Lisbon. It is a setting that evokes in the spectator the anticipation of horror, because empty hotels always harbor the possibility of the unknown. Hallways that seem to stretch farther than they should, a swimming pool that no longer refreshes but conceals. It is an ideal territory for fear to emerge. But the son, Nuno, looks at this space without flinching. No jump, no fright: only adolescent curiosity.
Oksman wonders what happens to fear when children no longer recognize it as a territory to explore. He recalls his own first terrifying images, those that shaped his relationship with cinema and with his father. He wants Nuno to feel something similar — for fiction to be, for him as well, a bridge to the unknown. But the boy remains calm, as if the fears of adults did not belong to him. Here appears a central idea of the film: terror does not only come from what stalks us in the darkness, but also from what is disappearing before we can hold on to it. Nuno’s childhood. Oksman’s father’s memory. Places that empty themselves until they become ruins of time. Terror as the certainty that everything we love is fleeting.
The figure of the murderer Diogo Alves, who crosses the narrative like an echo from the past, introduces a disturbing question: can evil be inherited, or is fear, instead, the true legacy? Oksman revisits family materials, fragments of lives that are no longer present but still inhabit the images, like ghosts that refuse to vanish. Each recorded memory seems to ask: to whom do the ghosts we carry belong — the past or the future?
A Horror Movie ends up being a work that seeks more than it finds. It is an attempt to understand the invisible threads that bind parents and children, what is transmitted without words: a language, a gesture, a film that marked us. Along the way, Oksman discovers that the deepest fear may not be what lies behind a closed door, but the one that signals the end of a stage, the end of protection, the inevitable arrival of adulthood. That, ultimately, is the fear that truly frightens — the one that reaches us all.
